Whether or not someone is doing a good job is a highly subjective question, and whereas a private firm has a very objective criterion by which to judge overall performance (profitability), the government does not. Hence, before the days of civil service protections it was common for the dawning of a new administration to herald mass firings of current government employees and their replacement by hand-picked "friends" of the new president's political allies in local political machines. This was judged to be A Bad Thing and the only remedy the people of the era could think of was to make it hard to fire government employees.